


ceasefire song and dance

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Gift Fic, Season/Series 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 19:28:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6127654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabriel invites Amara to dinner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ceasefire song and dance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [needsmoreyellow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/needsmoreyellow/gifts).



> Inspired by Richard Speight Jr's assertion that Gabriel would [wine and dine Amara to death](https://twitter.com/WinchesterBros/status/703719495144251393), for Bre's birthday. I love you, lil jellybean!

_Wellington, Ohio_

 

It smells like a trap. She stands a few safe feet away on the heaving, uneven concrete, the hem of her dress dusting the weeds. The warehouse door is rusted red and slightly open—just a metal sheet on hinges—she can hear music from inside, and it's old and scratched, like her.

 

Above her the sky is deep and the stars are out, pushing through the distant city smog. She hates to find it beautiful. The grainy yellow salt-light of the streetlamp down the alley and the hum of firelight inside are the only things to see by. She could almost feel alone, if not for the thing behind that door.

 

Amara gathers a handful of her skirt and steps over the curb.

 

The door screams when she pushes it back, rust flaking off on her palm, and the sound seems to carry for miles, echoing back behind her, drilling into her ears. When it stops, jammed up against something, the music bleeds in again, her eyes adjust, she lets her skirt fall out of her hand.

 

It smells like a trap because it is one, but she's not one to be deterred. What kind of trap could anyone set for something like her? It'll amuse her, she thinks, while she waits for Dean to inevitably come to her, and the music skips and falls back into its run, a woman's warbling voice from a long time ago. In the center of the cement floor—she could almost laugh—a folding card table, red-checked cloth, two stunted white candles, two chairs, and angel in one of them.

 

She looks at him. Feels him out.

 

“You're dead, aren't you?” she says, by way of greeting.

 

He looks at her for a long minute, and she looks back. He's small in body but the thing behind his sun-coloured eyes is huge.

 

“That's what they tell me,” he says.

 

He stands up—cordial, smiling. Her heels click when she walks toward him, and maybe it's instinct learned on those old reels of black-and-white that Crowley showed her, but she lifts her hand like Claudette Colbert, and he kisses it like Clark Gable.

 

“Gabriel,” he says.

 

“Amara. You're dead,” she says again.

 

“Dead things tend to resurface when Uncreation shows her face.” He doesn't gesture to the empty chair; she takes it anyway. He winks at her. “And it is a nice face.”

 

“I'm not flattered.”

 

He whistles, low.

 

When he sits down opposite her again—uncomfortable chairs, these—his eyes are at level with hers. It's disconcerting. The halo the candles give him makes it hard to read his face.

 

“Thanks for coming,” he says, leaning back.

 

“What do you want?” Amara says, bluntly, crossing one leg over the other, sitting straight-backed in her chair. The music is full of white noise and it's getting on her nerves. “This can't be what it looks like. You're an archangel. Your kind hate me.”

 

Gabriel's face opens and his amusement absolutely grates her, feels like it's peeling off her skin. He holds a hand to his heart. “Aw, doll. I _really_ hate you, don't get me wrong.”

 

“This is your idea of a trap?”

 

“Why'd you come, then?”

 

She scowls. Can feel it deepening with every millimeter his own grin widens.

 

“Come on,” he says genially, rapping the knuckle of his index finger on the edge of the table, and abruptly there is a fine-china plate in front of her, full of more food than she's seen in her time on this planet, heaped and steaming and gorgeous and completely unappetizing. “Take a load off. Eat something. Let's chat.”

 

“I don't eat, and neither do you.”

 

“I'm being hospitable here.”

 

“What you're doing is rapidly boring me.” She feels out, and the music screeches to a stop, and Gabriel's eyes flicker sideways; for the first time he seems uneasy. She leans forward, her shoulders stiff. She shouldn't have come. A waste of her time. “If this is a trap, get to it. I'm curious.”

 

She has to admit, he recovers admirably. His smile comes back as fluidly as it left. 

 

“If you're curious, play along.” 

 

A wine glass, suddenly, where there wasn't one before. And a clay bottle in the center of the table at the sound of Gabriel's snapping fingers, and something about it makes her recoil back into her chair like a snake after striking.

 

“What is that?” she demands. “What is it?” She  _hates_ it. Whatever is inside it makes her skin crawl, an energy bowing out in waves. 

 

Gabriel hasn't moved. He's watching her intently.

 

“Wine,” he says calmly.

 

“That isn't wine, and you know it.”

 

“It is.” He reaches forward, takes the bottle by the molded handle, pulls out the stopper. He shrugs. “'Course,” he says, tipping it over his own glass, filling it with something thin and purple-red, “if you don't want any—you know, you miss out on a lot, hating Creation like you do.”

 

She only relaxes when he puts the stopper back. Realises she's gripping the edge of the card table hard in her hands and loosens them.

 

“I doubt it,” she says, through grit teeth. 

 

“Oh, yeah,” he says, taking the stem of his glass in his fingers, taking a sip; she waits, feeling those waves of electricity, the near-sentient ripples of the stuff in his cup, they make her sick. “Wine—I mean, say what you want. When humans invented this stuff, they did pretty well.”

 

The stench of the beautiful food in front of her is making her sick. She blinks, and it's gone. If he seemed uneasy before, she feels it herself now, and hates it—a roiling acid in her stomach, half of half of half of the feeling of every angel in Heaven focusing their power on her—it had knocked her off her feet then; maybe she isn't as steady as she'd thought. 

 

Amara rolls her shoulders back, tightens herself. She  _could_ get up and leave if she wanted. But that doesn't seem sporting.

 

“Wine,” Gabriel says—he's still talking—“you've got wine—you don't know what you're missing. You're missing, I mean, the Taj Mahal, you're missing foie gras, skyscrapers, submarines. Music,” he says, and that disembodied sound begins again, scratching into existence.  _When they begin the Beguine._ Amara sets her teeth.

 

“I suppose you'll tell me I'm missing death, too,” she says. “And love.”

 

Gabriel shrugs.

 

“Have some wine,” he says. “Come on. Humor me.”

 

“It's not wine.”

 

He takes another sip, holding her gaze.

 

“You were always kind of a fairy tale for us,” he says. He's sitting half-sideways in his chair, foot crossed lazily on his knee. He's in his element, somehow, and it grates on her that she can't tell what that means. “I mean, you've got this all-loving Father, and sometimes it trickles down that there was Something Else, back before time even existed, which, honestly, that's hard for even  _us_ to conceputalize—you know. For the longest time you were just the moral of the story. The thing on Lucifer's arm.” 

 

He's reading her, and she tries to close up, lock her face. This is a trap, she can't forget. 

 

“By the way,” he says, holding up his glass as if to toast her, “fuck you. Enabler.”

 

“Enabler?”

 

“He was always going to Fall. It was in his nature. You just made it worse.”

 

“I never knew him,” she says. “I never knew Cain, either. I am not evil. You know this. If He hadn't locked me up behind that Mark—”

 

“Save it for someone who cares,” says Gabriel. His voice is ice-cold.

 

He nudges the clay bottle toward her. She sits stock still, glaring through the candlelight.

 

“And you're here now. Aren't you? Sweeping around, talking big talk. Looking for God.”

 

“I only want to meet Him. Talk to Him.”

 

“Unmake everything while you do it. Right.”

 

“It was always in my nature,” she says.

 

“Have some wine.”

 

“No.”

 

Gabriel uncorks the bottle again, pours himself another glass.

 

“Here's the problem, Amara,” he says. “You don't have any idea who you're up against.”

 

She scoffs. “You?”

 

“Oh, hell no,” Gabriel says, laughing; it seems like it rings out for miles, makes her teeth itch. “Not me. The Winchesters.” He leans forward conspiratorially, swirling his wine above the crook of his arm. “See, practically everyone in Heaven, Hell, and anywhere between has had a bone to pick with those two at some point—present company included.”

 

“And?”

 

“You're pretty special, you know? You're the Great Unifier. All of a sudden, everybody, and I do mean  _everybody—_ everybody's on  _their_ side.” 

 

Her nerves are ticking. The smell of the wine is giving her a headache and neither of these things, nerves and headaches, are things she even knew she could have.

 

“Against you.”

 

It catches the light like a glass of blood.

 

“It's just a matter of time before they figure out how to beat you,” he says, and he almost sounds sympathetic. “It'll be soon. And it'll devastate you. If they don't lock you back up, they'll kill you outright.”

 

“I suppose you intend to help them do that.”

 

Gabriel shrugs.

 

“Killing's not so much my bag anymore.”

 

Something strange is happening in her mouth, watching him drink that wine. Softness, dryness. She hunts in the back of her brain for the word.

 

“You know the difference between you and Him?”

 

Thirst.

 

“He's a deadbeat, sure. And nobody knows where He's at. Least of all me—so sorry, if you hoped I could tell you—He's gone, left the farm, flown the coop. But He made me.” He's looking into his glass, his face faraway, his jaw tight. Serious. “He made the Winchesters. Every little old lady and blade of grass on this planetary hunk of junk. He loved it into being. I think you're jealous.”

 

“Love and death,” she says, unamused. 

 

“You've got neither.”

 

They sit in a taut, skinned silence for a moment, the music skipping and seething and warping, the candles guttering, the wine sitting center between them.

 

“Have some wine,” he says, very softly. “What do you think it's gonna do to you? You're the Darkness. You're the End of Everything.”

 

“It's not wine,” she says, almost a whisper.

 

“Does that matter?”

 

He reaches out, pushes the bottle her way a little more, and this time, she lifts a hand, rests her fingertips on the cold hard clay.

 

Amara lifts the bottle, her heart in her throat, if she has a heart. She fills her glass less than halfway. In the candlelight. 

 

“Pinkie promise,” Gabriel says, smiling again, lifting up his little finger. A sense of dread lifts off her. She hates his self-assured grin, his cocky little attempt at doing her harm. “It won't kill you.”

 

Looking at it—it still makes her stomach churn. Her blood go cold. But it looks like wine. Smells like it. 

 

“Try it,” he says lazily. “If you don't like it, I'll finish it off.”

 

He closes his eyes, drains his own glass. Sighs, looks off into the dark of the warehouse around them, his knee still propped out to the side.

 

Amara lifts the glass to her mouth and takes a sip.

 

Nothing happens. Nothing that she can tell. 

 

She feels it slide, warm, down her throat, into her stomach, and stares at him.

 

“Not so bad, huh?” he says.

 

He's trying to hide it, but he's grinning like a fool, like a satisfied fool. 

 

She feels the dread settle again, like a heavy pall on her head.

 

“Wanna know where I got it?” Gabriel says, twirling his empty glass in his fingers, and she gets the most horrible feeling that he's gotten exactly what he wanted.

 

It erupts, volcanic, inside her, an electric shock blooming hard inside her torso, screaming up, and she chokes, grips the table hard, gasps, struggling to breathe.

 

“Picked it up in Jerusalem, two thousand-odd years ago,” he says, standing up; he isn't looking at her. Doesn't need to. Her glass tips over, shatters, she shunts back from the card table and the red-checked cloth, clutching her stomach—

 

“You're right,” he says, coming round, leaning down to grip her by the shoulders and lift her up, get to her feet. Every part of her is cramping, repulsed, and she stares at him, her eyes wide and mortified. “It wasn't wine.”

 

“Blood—” she chokes, and his grin lights up his face like she's just hit the nail on the head. 

 

“Blood of Christ, in fact,” he says, patting her on the back, gripping her trembling arm. “Strong stuff.”

 

“You—”

 

“Don't look at me,” he says, and she wrenches her arm out of his grip, stumbles backward into her chair, breathing hard and ragged, the power is dissipating in her but she can still feel it, curling in earthworm forms around her bones and brain. “ _You_ drank it.”

 

Gabriel stands there, watching her struggle, watching her try to gasp past the pain, clutching fistfuls of her own flesh, fixing him with all the fury she can muster in her eyes.

 

“I won't kill you,” he says. “'S not my job. But that'll stay in you—it'll curdle, fester, eat you up like cancer—and when the Winchesters come for you,” he says, leaning down to meet her eyes, she  _hates_ it, “and they  _will_ come for you—”

 

He reaches out, runs his fingers through her hair; he's made such a fool of her. She thinks that she might hate him more than God.

 

“Well—by then it'll be like pulling the wings off a fly.”

 

He straightens again. The card table, the candles, the wine is all gone, the vast dark space of the warehouse blurring and fogging.

 

“Hand of God's a bitch, ain't it?” he says.

 

He turns, hands in his pockets, small in body, that huge golden thing of him curling and rupturing out of him, she can see it behind the universe. Turning to leave, leave her in that chair, her ribs constricting, every part of her being fighting the poison he tricked into her—

 

“I'll kill you,” she snarls. “I'll kill you for this—”

 

He laughs. 

 

“Good luck!” he calls, over his shoulder, his voice shattering and stinging in her ears. “No one can ever seem to make that stick.”


End file.
